Coming Soon to FluidSurveys: Advanced Piping!

We have something really cool to share with you today as we take a sneak peak into the FluidSurveys development room. The team is working to add some super-advanced & useful features to our piping abilities!

In case you’re not terribly familiar with the concept of piping, here is an excerpt from our online documentation:

“Piping is defined as taking the respondent’s answer to a previous question and inserting it (a.k.a piping it) into a later question. This sort of behavior will help keep your respondent more engaged and will make them feel as if the survey is customized to their particular situation.”

So, for example, you could ask for the participant’s name and use that information to customize the proceeding pages of your survey. Simple, right?

Let’s Make it Even Better

With the upcoming advancements, you will be able to do much more with piping.

For example, you will be able to pipe data on the same page of your survey. What do we mean by that? Well, presently you can only reference piped data from previous pages. So if the survey respondant typed their name onto page 1 of your survey, you could not reference that until page 2 or beyond.

After this update, this limitation will be gone like the last chocolate donut with sprinkles.

We’re also giving you the ability to perform spreadsheet-like functions with your piped data.

Let’s say you wanted to calculate the sum of all numeric values for one of your questions, and then use that information in a different question. Not a problem! But what if you wanted to pick out the highest value from a series of numbers input by the survey respondent? This is also possible! We will be adding even more functionality, but you have to wait until the update goes live to hear about the rest!

Timeline

These new features will be made available sometime in February 2013. This blog post & our online documentation will be updated when the release happens. So until then, stay tuned & keep surveying!

Sean O'Dacre

Sean is a coordinator for the search marketing team at Fluidware. He enjoys building awareness of Fluidware's solutions through the development of relationships with other web communities. He is also an active member of several search engine optimization user groups and forums.